Architectures for 'richer' web applications

Now that JavaOne is over (not that I got to go) and we are all more up-to-date with where Java is going, I have a simple question: as Java developers are we in a better position to develop web applications that offer a richer user experience? To this end I have developed a simple test scenario:

test scenario

I have a service that can provide the metadata for several thousand items (id, title, creation date, status, etc) and a service that can deliver an HTML description giving further details of an item specified by its id. I want to develop a web application that displays the metadata in a table on the left (allowing the user to resize, reorder columns etc) and the HTML description of a 'selected' item on the right. When the user selects a row in the table, the HTML description on the right is updated. As a complication the description may also reference zero or more other items. Selecting one of these links should update the both the description and reset the selection in the table.

I can imagine a number of responses:

  • Java WebStart: create a WebStart application using the JDNC table component and the JDIC browser component. The interaction between the two components would be defined in Java. While I have no doubt this would provide a fine user interface, I suspect that WebStart solutions are just not percieved as being 'standard' web apps.
  • JSF: create a web app using some [yet to be developed?] table JSF component. Altough a JSF table may be able to handle the reodering of columns and the like, the concern is round-tripping to the server each time to deliver a large table.
  • something else... my preference would be for a JDNC table component embedded in one frame (as an applet) and the item's HTML description displayed in a second frame and have the interaction between the two defined in Javascript.

Currently the last solution is not possible because JDNC components cannot be scripted. My understanding is that the resources were not there to both develop the components and a scripting solution. This post is something of a test to see whether there is any interest in trying to plug that gap.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

SmartLink

Image
In a previous post I tried to describe how I thought technologies like SmartTags and AutoLink ought to behave. With greasemonkey in Firefox I've been able to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator. For the moment I'm calling it Smart Tag/Auto Link. SmartLink is based upon the idea that content authors should mark-up content that can be 'smart-linked', using standard XHTML constructs. This has two advantages: it effectively provides an 'opt-in' mechanism for content providers it doesn't require 'magic' to identify what can be smart-linked and thus provides a much more extensible approach. of course there is one fairly major disadvantage: there isn't any suitably marked-up content out there, with the exception of some test posts I've put together for the purpose. Getting Started If you want to know a bit more about SmartLink then click here . Alternatively if you want to see how SmartLink behaves and you're using Firefox t
Read more

A Review of hReview

microformats may well represent a path from where we are today to the [lowercase] semantic web. If so, one of the first waypoints along such a path could be the emergence of aggregators capable of taking advantage of suitably marked-up content. Applying a 'microformat' approach to tagging, Technorati introduced the rel="tag" approach to marking-up tags. Technorati also supply the corresponding aggregation service, e.g. see posts tagged with microformat . Given this minimalist approach to tagging, the hReview specification comes as something of a surprise. It seems to represent a format developed independently of the environment in which it is most likely to be used. The rel="tag" approach makes a major, simplifying assumption. This is that the tag refers 'to a major portion of the current page (i.e. a blog post)' . I am assuming that it could apply equally to a blog entry in an RSS/Atom feed. Thus an aggregator can associate a tag with two p
Read more

Speculations about developing with iCloud

It's been three months since Apple revealed it's vision of the cloud to the world. After its introduction, much was written (e.g. It Just Works ) about how iCloud compares 'philosophically' with others, most obviously Google. Now, supposedly close to launch and with iCloud in the hands of developers, there seems to be surprisingly little written about how that philosophy translates into developing a modern iOS app. Apple promises consumers that things 'will just work'. Just keep using apps in the same way and they will magically remain up-to-date across all your devices - in truth I'm not sure more magic was promised. Apple might be making a similar offer to developers. In principle iCloud means that an ObjectiveC developer with XCode can create and distribute apps containing this magical ingredient without having to learn any new skills, without having to develop any cloud-based components at all. What's more, with relatively little extra work, they c
Read more